For a year, Decoratelier Jozef Wouters worked with Open Arts House Globe Aroma on Underneath Which Rivers Flow. A group of women and men – builders, poets and dreamers – met weekly in the Decoratelier in Molenbeek. Together, they built stories, a secret garden full of wormholes to unsuspected worlds.

Studio Cité orients, directs, diverts and distorts your view of the world. Step inside a driving mirror cart by yourself, form a dancing circle with your fellow audience members, or stand on the side-lines watching how people with periscopic masks try to find their way. Benjamin Vandewalle organizes an artistic funfair that offers unexpected experiences on Brussels’ squares.

In 2017, Salva Sanchis and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker adapted A Love Supreme with four young, male dancers. The distinctly vibrant production was immediately selected for the TheaterFestival. It is high time that you join the dancers again and succumb to John Coltrane’s spiritual tribute to divine love!

Mette Ingvartsen creates a universe in which people, technology and organic matter coexist to create an abstract set of movements. Inspired by how bodies are sensorially affected by the digital, the performance explores a poetics of plasticity, abstraction and imagination. Through light, shadow and reflection, the nine dancers open an enchanting landscape that you can enter as a viewer.

Vera Tussing invites the string quartet Quatuor MP4 to join four dancers onstage for a playful encounter between movement and sound. At the point where the orbits of dance and music intersect, you are invited to enter the kaleidoscopic score. Lend a hand, or an arm!

Michiel Vandevelde goes in search of traces of the legacy of May ’68, along with a new generation of young people. Will they open new perspectives on the future when they research half a century of history in a wild choreography of iconic images?

Radouan Mriziga finds inspiration in an old love: rap music. Along with seven young performers, he researched everything that makes rap unique: the rhythm, the flow, the statements and gestures, and its history from the grandmasters to Kendrick Lamar. They attempt to capture the essence of a style of music that transcends musical trends and survives across generations – and which constantly reinvents itself.

Rétrospective is Jérôme Bel’s subjective reflection on his own work. He chose eighteen dance fragments from his video archive. Through meticulous editing, he has used them to reconstruct the development of his thinking about dance. By emphasizing the links between dance and politics, he foregrounds central themes in his work. After the film screening, there will be an extended conversation with the choreographer.

Three performers spend three quarters of an hour turning around their own axis – a movement that in Sufi ceremonies is thought to lead to religious euphoria. In Miet Warlop’s version, it becomes an experiment on the fine line between maintaining and losing control. It is a combination of swirling dance, recital and concert. How can you find a balance between self-control and devotion?

Shown and Told is a dynamic performance-collage founded on structured improvisation and associative leaps. It is an encounter between choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart and writer/performance artist Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment). Together, they explore the relationship between movement, images and the body as a performance instrument.

In the late 1920s, Nâzım Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkish poetry, and he was thus the first modern Turkish poet. He wrote the majority of Human Landscapes, his magnum opus, while in prison. The five hundred-page epic was only published posthumously, divided into five ‘books’. Michiel Vandevelde staged Book I last year, commissioned by steierische herbst. Book II now follows.

In the late 1920s, Nâzım Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkish poetry, and he was thus the first modern Turkish poet. He wrote the majority of Human Landscapes, his magnum opus, while in prison. The five hundred-page epic was only published posthumously, divided into five ‘books’. Michiel Vandevelde staged Book I last year, commissioned by steierische herbst. Book II now follows.

During a meditative crying marathon that lasts almost an hour, two futuristic female characters question the mechanisms that turn personal emotions into political phenomena. In a choreography that uses video and large sheets of paper – simultaneously protest signs and drying laundry – their tears of weakness become an act of political power.

Water Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers that uses melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of ‘the will’, this dystopian fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end.

Almost ten years after Zeitung (2008), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Alain Franco used the building blocks of that production to make a new one: Zeitigung. Against the backdrop of a changing world and channelled through the bodies of eight young dancers, they updated their own work. Zeitigung is returning to the Kaaitheater stage, where it premièred in 2017.

Inspired by the essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, Anneleen Keppens has choreographed and will dance three Movement Essays. Each piece explores a different elemental dimension of abstract dance – while at the same time making associations outside dance. Together they form an intimate and multifaceted dance solo.

Why is it important to cast a spotlight on the marginalized history of feminism in Romania and Eastern Europe? And what might this mean for our collective, historical consciousness With a collage of feminist voices, artistic gestures, historical avant-garde, and traditional songs, Eszter Salamon focuses on Romanian histories.

In the American Midwest of the 1880s, men would conceal illegal bottles of alcohol in their boots. The term ‘Bootlegging’ – meaning to smuggle (liquor) – was born. Now there is Bootlegged: an encounter between Boyzie Cekwana and Danya Hammoud. Two bodies, two stories and two histories collide to create a third, shared story.

While many creators praise the empty stage as the central place for fantasy, in Physics and Phantasma it becomes compulsive and traumatic. The vacuum must at all costs by filled with something! To this end, Iggy Lond Malmborg takes you on a journey to random and dark corners of your imagination: the place where this solo takes shape.

Achterland (1990) is a seminal choreography in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s oeuvre. The minimalism and prevalent femininity of Rosas’ early pieces gave way to an ambiguous no-man’s-land in which boundaries and symbols were blurred. Last season, the reprise of Achterland starring a new generation of Rosas dancers made a tremendous impression: don’t miss this opportunity to see it again.

On a stage covered with a thick layer of earth and bathed in light stand fourteen dancers – all different in age and dance background. Movements flow from one body to the next, gradually building to a wild climax. The result is a tactile experience that shares loneliness with fiction: how is it that you can be alone even when you’re in a group?

In this humorous and passionate monologue performed by Einat Tuchman, Orla Barry explores the boundaries of art, gender, and the rural everyday. She describes the experiences of an artist who returns from the city to her rural roots and is reborn as a hybrid ‘farmer-artist’. Coincidence, humour and a subtle language game are the ingredients of a production that blends oral historiography with personal memories.

Does gender have a voice, does skin have a race? Using drag, vogueing, striptease, YouTube tutorials as well as the triadic ballet by Oskar Schlemmer, seven bodies and many more objects try out new constellations, like surrealist ready-mades. With a great sense of irony, Escape Act presents hyper-stereotyped gender identities, only to deconstruct them completely.

1974, Zaire. In the Fight of the Century, Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman. Mobutu Sese Seko founded the National Ballet of Zaire. Fast forward to 2019. Faustin Linyekula has created a production in which he reflects on key moments in the history of theatre. Along with three members of the Congolese National Ballet and actors Papy Maurice Mbwiti and Oscar van Rompay, he explores what the young Congolese state could have become.